In this podcast episode, Carl Allen interviews Jim Helms, a successful protege in Carl’s program who has closed eight deals within two years, primarily in the recruitment and staffing industry. Jim shares his journey from working on Wall Street to transitioning into executive search, and eventually becoming an expert dealmaker. He explains how a health scare motivated him to shift his focus from starting recruitment firms to acquiring them, which led him to the Protege program.

Jim emphasizes the importance of staying in one’s lane and leveraging one’s strengths. He initially faced challenges with broker listings but found success by utilizing his deep knowledge of LinkedIn to source off-market deals. His deal-sourcing strategy includes outreach via LinkedIn, email, and SMS, which has proven to be highly effective. Jim now offers this as a service, helping other proteges find off-market deals using his system, known as the “Deal Yoda” program.

Carl and Jim discuss the psychology of dealmaking, stressing that many small business acquisitions depend on building strong relationships with sellers. Jim highlights how his relationship-building skills, cultivated through his recruitment background, have played a crucial role in his success. Sellers often prioritize trust and rapport over financial gain, which has enabled Jim to structure favorable annuity deals.

The conversation also touches on the importance of creative deal structuring, with Carl sharing the story of how he developed the annuity deal model. This structure allows sellers to receive consistent income over time, which many prefer over a large lump sum, especially in volatile financial markets. Jim’s experience shows that understanding seller psychology and offering creative solutions can lead to more successful acquisitions.

In conclusion, Jim reflects on the lessons he’s learned from his eight deals, particularly the value of trusting his vision and instincts while staying realistic about the limits of his influence, especially in relationship-driven businesses. His innovative approach to deal sourcing and commitment to adding value to sellers has been key to his success in the Protege program.

Full Transcript:

Their sellers rarely sell what the buyer believes they’re buying. Even if I can fund it, I’ll never buy the best business in the market. I’ll never buy the worst business in the market. I wanna buy a good business for a low sensible multiple that I can turn into a great business and really make it super sophisticated.

I leveraged LinkedIn to source my deals. And as I started to scale and started to provide services for others, right, I was taking these deals to private equity funds and investors and stuff. And they’re like, where are you getting all these from? How do you do this? Can you do it for us? And then proteges are like, no, I don’t want you to teach me. I want you to do it. So yeah, we have that service. Absolutely.

I just need ten thousand dollars a month and I’ll start my business. I said, well, why don’t I become the annuity provider? He said, what do you mean? I said, well, I’ll just pay you ten thousand dollars a month. He said, you can do that?

I said, a very warm welcome to the Creative Dealmaker podcast. I’m Karl Allen. I’m your host, and I’m gonna be interviewing expert guests sharing investor strategies that will completely and utterly disrupt the market when it comes to buying and selling businesses all over the world.

Hey guys, Carl Allen back with another episode of the Creative Deal Maker podcast. Got a very special guest today. It’s Jim Helms, probably one of my best students. He’s done some incredible stuff inside of the program, so much so he’s now also a coach and a team leader and somebody that I depend on very, very much inside of this community. So Jim Helms, a very warm welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

So, obviously, I know I know a lot about you, and I know you’re up in the northern part of Florida. You’re up in Jacksonville. Right? That’s where you live?

Correct. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.

And I know Chris Moore’s in town, and I know he wants to hang with you because you’re a legend. But, yeah, just for the benefits of the viewers and listeners, just give us your backstory. Like, how did you get into deal making? What did you do before that? And how have you been able to leverage all those superpowers and done some really cool deals that we are gonna talk about today?

Yeah. So, my background is I spent five years on Wall Street as an institutional sales rep and market maker. And, when they abolished the Glass Steagall Act back in ninety six, I was given the option of moving to New York with my family that was born in Florida and two toddlers or, transitioning. So I got into the executive search space, and I had worked with that team, during an internship previously. And, yeah, it’s been a whirlwind, man.

I’m part of two partnerships that we exited successfully and, as well as a, a recruitment tech startup that we got VC funding. It was housed in the tech commerce center. And, we exited that. You could say successfully, but I don’t consider it a success because it was acquired by Monster. We advised since Flipdawgs, to, web crawler technology. And so they they acquired Flipdock and tried to buy us out, and we refused. And then they increased our licensing fee tenfold. So we graciously accepted their generous offer. And then I I had another firm that I crashed and burned. And, the financial recruitment was not very kind during the two thousand and eight implosion, as you know. That.

And then I was doing my own thing for a while. And so this kinda leads into my why. I had a very successful retained executive search practice for private equity clients, and I got a cancer scare. And, thought I only had months to live. They removed my kidney, and it turned out it was benign. I didn’t have cancer at all. And so then I, yeah. Yeah. Right? Knock on wood.

But, as I started to rebuild my practice up, I was approached by, HIG Capital, to replace their chief marketing officer in one of their portfolio companies. And, as the discovery and conversations unfolded, I took that positioned myself as CRO, for their portfolio company. Grew them from thirty eight to sixty five million during the pandemic. And then when I left, I went, I’m tired of starting recruiting firms. I wanna buy one.

So that’s what led me to Protege, obviously. And, like all the other Proteges, I started out calling all the broker listings and got real frustrated with that real quick. And I started I went back to my strengths and did what I know how to do. And I ended up I think the first deal I I know you’ve got some marketing collateral on it, but I think it was fifty one days in, closed my first deal.

Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk about that first deal. Let’s talk about first deal then.

So so your your original buy I know you’ve done lots of other deals since then, but your original buy box was recruitment because that’s your that’s your lane. You probably heard me say it a thousand times. Stay in your lane. You clearly did. But let’s talk about that first deal. How did you find it? How did you close it?

So it this was actually a referral from an old stockbroker friend that used to be my trading assistant, and it was, an online coaching and options trading education platform. And so I he he made the intro and conversations progressed quickly. And, I actually partnered with a fellow protege. And, we had to between, you know, I put a few dollars in the deal. He put a few more, and then the owner financed the balance. Wow.

We’ve we’ve had some issues with that that owner. I learned a lot on that deal. And part of that was, you know, ignoring some red flags and getting deal heat to get it done. So it’s been an incredibly valuable lesson. Not not, a successful acquisition at this point in time. We’ll see what comes of it eventually. I I have a plan in place to turn lemons into lemonade, but we’ll see what happens.

But after that, I said, you know what? I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna take Carl’s advice. I paid this man money for it. So I’m gonna take it. And I focused exclusively on recruiting and staffing agencies, and it snowballed rapidly for me.

Yeah. So that’s what happens. Like like, sometimes so there’s two things there that you mentioned that are really, really important. The first one is is is deal lead. Right? So often, we find a deal, especially the Salesforce deal, and we get so hot about the deal. We’ll not only ignore all the other deals in our pipeline, but, you know, we’ll we’ll we’ll take shortcuts and we’ll do those things. You know, I’ve done it. You’ve done it. Everybody’s done it.

And then secondly, if you did compound that with buying a business that’s not in your lane, It was kind of in your lane, I suppose, because you you came from the financial world. So online options trading, coaching, it’s kind of in your lane. But, yeah, I’m thrilled that that you learned from that first deal and then went into the recruitment space, which you obviously had a lot more experience with. But let let’s talk about some of those deals because I know, the last photograph I I saw you in our marketing with, with all those tombstones. You’re gonna need a bigger table, for all of the jobs you’ve done.

But, yeah, let let’s talk about the recruitment world because this this is one of my favorite industries. I’ve owned three no. Four. I’ve owned four recruitment businesses in my past. I don’t own any today. I’m looking at some. I know you and I looked at one. About a year or so ago, that was a monster deal, wasn’t it? It was like doing, like, you know, twenty million dollars a year.

It it it was. It was, you know, it turned out to be a blessing that we didn’t get it, because of what happened in the economy, from, you know, what the like, the, end of two q in twenty twenty two for, first part of the third quarter. We saw Silicon Valley Bank fail and rates start rising, and so companies naturally start to claw back and stop their third party spending for for that stuff. And it impacted probably eighty, eighty five, ninety percent of the recruitment agencies. But I I quickly adopted and found a way to leverage that to my advantage with the annuity structures that he that teach.

So yeah, let let’s talk about the annuity deal structure, you know, for a little bit. Have I ever told you the story about where the where the annuity deal came from?

No.

So so I’m on a call that this this is about eighteen months, two years ago, just before we started teaching annuity deals, and now there’s been, like, over two hundred annuity deals closed inside of Protege. And and as you know, I only teach you stuff that that that I’m doing. I don’t teach you stuff that I did ten years ago because even though I was doing deals thirty years ago, the market’s changed in the last year. Right? So I’m teaching you stuff that I’m doing in real time. And when I go back to, I think, twenty twenty two, and I’m on a call with, with with a guy that you know, the web design agency. Right? So I’m on the call with this guy.

And as you know, businesses are worth a multiple of their profit, which we call leaving. And generally, if, you know, this this business is doing five, six hundred thousand dollars a year of EBITDA. So normally, you’d be paying two and a half to three times multiple for that type of business. Right? So but this guy’s asking price was six x. Right? Six x was the price of this deal.

So I said to this guy, I’m like, wow. You must have, like, a best in class business. You must have the best business in the market to command the six times multiple. Like, tell me about that. And he’s like, what are you talking about? Multiples. I have no idea what you’re talking about. My wealth managers value my business. I was like, woah. Hang on a minute. What do you mean your wealth managers value business? Wealth managers are not qualified to value businesses. Right? Hopefully, you went to a CPA or a CPA or an investment bank. Hopefully not a broker. Like, who’s valued your business?

What is a wealth manager? Because I told him how much money I needed to make per month over, say, the next ten years, so I could fund my retirement without changing my lifestyle. So my wealth manager took that amount of money. I think it was ten, twelve thousand dollars a month, put it into his computer, and the wealth manager calculated what would have to go into an annuity product to generate that income. He grossed it up for tax and fees and all those different things, and that became the valuation of the business. I was like, wow. That’s fascinating. I I’ve never heard of that before.

And then I thought about it, and I said, so really, all you want is ten thousand dollars a month? He said, absolutely. I just need ten thousand dollars a month, and I’ll start my business. I said, well, why don’t I become the annuity provider? He said, what do you mean? I said, well, I’ll just pay you ten thousand dollars a month. He said, you can do that? I said, yeah.

The the the business was cash flowing, you know, probably twenty seven, twenty eight thousand dollars a month. So I thought, hey. You know? I’ll even give you half of it. Right? I’ll give you half the current cash flow. I’ll take half the current cash flow. As I scale the business, you’ll get the fixed amount. You’ll have a full lean over the business if I don’t pay you. I’ll give you a performance guarantee so that it will prevent me taking all the money out of the business or doing something that you’re not gonna like. I can do the deal in a week, so you’re not gonna have to wait five months for me to go and raise SBA financing. I’m gonna do practically no due diligence because no one’s taking any risk. I’m gonna make sure you pay your tax returns. I’m gonna make sure that legally, the business is safe to buy. Was it was an LLC, and he wanted to sell the legal entity rather than selling the assets and closing down. I said, we can get this done, like, super, super quickly. He’s like, woah. That’s amazing.

And then he said, well, I’m gonna have closing costs. If I leave enough cash in the business, can you pay my attorney as a business expense? He said he said, I’m gonna do this. And then he sat back and he thought so my big question then, Carl, is would I rather trust the volatile financial markets to put my money in, pay loads of tax, and then hope I get an income stream, or do I trust you as the safe pair of hands to own my business and take it to the next level? And you answered his own question.

So that’s why we call them annuity deals because it’s an annuity stream or a retirement stream of income that we give to the seller. And what blew my mind as we started rolling this out in Protege and everybody started doing deals with this deal structure. It’s how much like retirees, boomers, prefer income that’s low tax versus a huge big capital gain with a huge amount of tax that they’ve then got to scramble to make that up in terms of what they invest in the market. Right?

So so that’s where the annuity deal structure But he trusted you more than the financial markets. Right?

That’s right.

Which means you had massive rapport and credibility established within that know, like, and trust factor was just maxed out.

Yeah. And that’s that’s a really critical point, I think, that a lot of people miss on annuity structures. Because as we get into these other deals, what I’ve found is is it it become almost like a brainstorming session with the seller of how to sell it to me. They they decided they wanted to sell it to me, and we just had to agree on the price and terms, which made that process so much easier than Yeah.

And and you know why concept initially. Right?

Yeah. You know why that’s so powerful. Right? And and it’s true. And I see, I didn’t realize this until I was in my my my thirties. Right? So as you know, I like you, I I worked on Wall Street. So I was doing, like, big Right. Deals where those deals, it’s about math. It’s about tax structures. It’s about legal structures. It’s financial engineering. That’s what Wall Street’s all about.

So when I left Wall Street and decided to buy small deals, like one to ten million dollar deals, what blew my mind, Jim, was how much more Main Street deals are about seller psychology than they are about them. Is that that’s why I wrote the book, The Creative Deal Maker. Right? So I wrote that book because it tells the story of a deal with all the drama and the emotion and the psychology that buyers and sellers go through.

And what I realized, my very first deal, out of Wall Street, I bought a company I bought a transportation company, like, five million dollar deal. The owner didn’t really care that much about the money. Right? All they cared about was the buy. They wanted somebody that they could trust that their business was gonna be in safe hands.

And a lot of the deals I’ve done since you know, I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of deals, since I left Wall Street. And more often than not, it’s all about the buyer. Right? Because a seller typically, they might have been in that business ten, twenty, thirty years. They spent more time in their business than they have with their own family. And it’s I suppose it’s like it’s like sending your kids off to college. Like, you wanna know they’re gonna be okay. Right? You don’t wanna have to worry about them. You wanna cheer them off from the sidelines.

And I find a lot of that in a lot of these small business acquisitions. So to your point, if you can build, like, really strong relationships and rapport with these people and truly position yourself as a safe pair of hands to take the business to the next level because the seller either doesn’t have the energy or the heart or or or just the time to do it themselves. They’d rather sell to somebody like us in a creative way than to a private equity fund or a trade buyer that’s likely gonna rip the business apart.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And a real quick story about that. I had this was a broker listing, and I made him an offer over a year and a half ago. And I I used a multi tier offer with, you know, lower multiple with the SBA and then kind of a hybrid and then the annuity. And he wanted the annuity multiple, but he wanted all cash like the SBA. And we’ve kept in touch.

And, I actually took him out fishing, and he he’s standing on my boat. We’re out fishing and shared with me that, Benchmark set the expectation with him that they would get him a nine to eleven x multiple by selling it to a strategic trade buyer. And and I I scoffed at that and explained why. And he said, oh, you’re you’re right. You’ve been absolutely right about everything throughout that entire process.

Yeah.

And I’m probably gonna sell my business to you, but I figured if I’m only gonna get a a two or three x multiple, I might as well just keep it. I’m working twenty hours a week, and I’ll keep it another four or five years, and then I’ll sell it to you.

Yeah. I was like, you know what? I could do the same thing in your your shoes. Right? He’s my age. He’s not he doesn’t need to retire. So If if he’s working on the business and not in the business, so if he’s only doing twenty hours a week and he’s got a team that’s taking care of everything else, that’s actually a smart play. Especially the business can grow because not only is he getting the distributions from the cash flow every year, he’s building that shareholder value for when it becomes time to sell it in the future.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I just thought it was comical that benchmark would knowingly set that expectation with them, and then all the offers are two and a half to four x multiples.

Yeah.

And and, like, there’s probably one in a hundred business or one in two hundred businesses that that can command that, you know, that that signs of multiple. And what what you and I both know is in any industry, there there’s a range of multiples in that market. Right? And that range is really, really wide. It could be as low as one and a half and as high as nine or eleven. Right? And that range of multiples, a business owner can’t control that range. That range is controlled by the capital markets as you know.

So when interest rates go up, cost of capital is higher, that range shifts to the left. Right? When interest rates are really low like they were a few years ago, multiples were higher because the debt service to pay for loans to buy companies is is cheaper. But but what a business owner can control is where their business lands in that range of multiples.

Now look up for us, most businesses are at the lower end of the range because they’re not unique. They’re not differentiated. Right? If you’ve got, like, if you’ve got the best business in the market in your industry, you you can probably command, like, the highest multiple that there is because every single person wants to buy it.

Right? Well, I’ll tell you a story. When I when I moved to Austin, couple of months ago, I saw my first ever Cybertruck. Right? So I’m driving down the road. I bought my wife a a Range Rover. Right? So we’re driving in the Range Rover, and the Cybertruck comes past me. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Right? It’s like the car I used to draw as a kid. Right? Fell in love with this car.

So literally, we stopped for coffee. I thought I gotta have one of these things on my wife’s side. Crazy. But I’m gonna buy a Cybertruck. So it goes on the Tesla website, seventy thousand bucks. Right? I’m buying one of these. Right? I’m gonna go buy one now. I go to the website. I places the order, four year wait list for a Cybertruck. I’m like, four years? I want one right now.

Well, if you go on CarGurus, I can buy one today, but it’s a hundred and fifty thousand bucks. Right? Because the supply is too low for the demand, and it’s the same in the business. Right? If you’ve got the best business in the market for what you do, everyone’s gonna wanna buy it, and it’s simple supply demand economics. It pushes up the multiple.

But I I will never buy a best in class business.

Even if I can fund it, I’ll never buy the best business in the market. I’ll never buy the worst business in the market. I wanna buy a good business for a low sensible multiple that I can turn into a great business and really make it super sophisticated. Because most of the businesses we look at, they have a low transfer of value score. Right? So the owner is the business. They work business model in the business. They don’t necessarily have KPIs and systems and processes. They have a lot of recurring revenue. They might have high customer concentration. They might have a high turnover of employees, and they might have an average reputation in the market. Right? That’s most businesses.

So most businesses by nature have an average or below average multiple. The very best businesses in the world, I don’t wanna buy those companies because then, you know, I can’t create shareholder value as quickly as I can, you know, with an average business. Yeah. No. I do the same thing. I’m looking you know, I I I tell proteges all the time, you know, sellers rarely sell what the buyer believes they’re buying. Right?

I’m gonna model it and value it based on what you are, you know, today and the last three years average and so forth. But my motive is what I can do with it in five years’ time. And so back to my niche of recruitment and staffing, a lot of those guys struggle with those processes and systems and automating a lot of the tedious stuff, which is what makes them so burned out and frustrating.

So how many how many deals so remind me, how many deals have you closed since you came into Protege?

Less than two well, next month will be two years in Protege here in a couple of weeks, and I just recently closed my eighth deal.

Eighth deal. Perfect. Good job, man. So, like, what are some of the biggest lessons that you’ve learned? I know you’ve learned the lesson on the first deal about staying in your lane, but, like, what are some of the other lessons you’ve learned across those other deals that you’ve done?

So I I probably have more lessons learned from the one not so great deal than the others combined, to be candid. But some of the things that I’ve learned with those are to, to believe in myself and that vision. Because one example was a, a staffing company, small staffing firm that did software engineers, and he was struggling with it, because of the pullback in the economy and everything. And I saw just a slight pivot towards the AI model and going after those AI firms. And, you know, we can we can track that, right, with PitchBook and Crunchbase and stuff, who’s getting funded and by who and so forth. And when they get that money, they’re gonna go on a hiring spree. We know this. Right? So we just follow the money, and I built an automated doorstep to help us. And we’ve we’ve nearly doubled that one already in, you know, a year’s time.

That’s amazing.

The guy was mind blown because he didn’t think of that. You know?

So so that one’s been my biggest success out of them, but but I’ve learned to trust myself. But at the same time with some of the others that are more relationship-centric like, a hospital administrative, staffing, company. They’re pure contingency see which, you know, kinda forced them into the annuity structure because no bank is gonna fund that unless they would for me through SBA would be it, but I wasn’t going SBA.

And, you know, there, those relationships are difficult to transfer, and I might have been a little too confident myself. So it’s a balancing act, but I’ve learned to trust my vision and instincts and not overestimate my impact on stuff like relationships and whatnot.

Nice.

And that was difficult to do because I’ve been in the relationship business my whole life.

Yeah. So you’d think you’re pretty good at it. Right?

Yeah. And I think that’s one of the secrets probably to your success. Right? I think you talked about a very powerful why at the start. That’s always a great thing to have. But, like, one of the things again, when I left Wall Street and on some Main Street deals, it it it shocked me how much relationships were critical when you’re doing a Main Street deal. So, obviously, coming from a relationship industry, clearly, you’re leveraging that in in a lot of the deals that you’re doing and the success that you’re obviously having.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s been that and and just, you know, like I said, focusing on that rapport with the seller. A a lot of people seem that I don’t even ask about the numbers. I let them bring it up. Everybody knows it’s gonna come up. And when I don’t bring it up fairly early, they get curious and so they wanna bring it up. But I’m just focused on building rapport and trying to show them how I bring value without showing them my playbook so that they get free consulting out of it.

So there’s a few vines that you’ve gotta learn to, you know, walk. But I I love that. I love that phrase, you know, free consulting. That’s the best way I’ve ever found to build rapport with somebody is to add value to them before, you know, you get into the throes of the deal. And it’s something my my dad told me long, long, long time ago before he passed away. He said, Carl, relationships are like a bank account. Right? Like, you can’t go and ask somebody for something until you’ve added value to them first. It’s like money. You put money into a bank, then you can draw that money out. Right? You gotta put something into a relationship before you ask, you know, something back.

One of the things I do a lot is, like, when I’m when I’m scouting deals, honestly, I got a big team now as you know. But, you know, back in the day when I used to be scouting my own deals, you know, I’d be talking to a seller, and, you know, they’d be all flustered. They’d be, you know, I can’t deal with this right now. I’ve got all these challenges in my business or I got all these challenges in my life. Can I come back to you in a few weeks? I would say absolutely. You know, I’ll I’ll be here for you whenever you’re ready, but in the meantime, what can I do to help you? Is there anything I can help you within the business? Is there anything I can help you with in in a relationship, in in your life?

Like, one seller I was looking to do a deal from, fortunately had a a death in the family. And he’s like, hey. I’m pausing this deal for a month till I take it to family. I’m like, that’s fine, but can I and, yeah, I need to help? Can I go can I get groceries for you guys? Can I can I do stuff to help you? And he’s he’s like, man, I don’t even know you yet. You’re you’re wanting to kinda help me and and me out of this bind. Like and I ended up buying his business because, like, when he decided it was time to sell, I was the only person that cared enough about him, not the deal, not the company. I just cared about him. Right? And and that it just goes such a long way in a relationship, and you you know this from your background.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the guy that I’ve referenced earlier that had his business listed with Benchmark. He, you know, because I explained what those trade buyers look for and how they value it. Right? I didn’t charge them for that. Benchmark never had that conversation with them. Plus, I took him fishing, and we had a great time. So that adds value in a different way. But he, you know, he he he basically said, I’m probably gonna sell my business to you. I’m just not ready yet if I can get a few more years of cash flow out of it and then do it. And he’s not alone.

I love that story. And that that’s a perfect segue into something else I I wanted to talk about, and then I’ll let you go. So I as you know, we’ve talked about brokers, and some brokers are okay.

Yeah.

But brokers I’ve got a couple.

Yeah. So, like, some brokers are great. Right? But, sadly, not all of them. But when you’re looking for when you’re scouting deals, right, once you got your buy box ticket out and then you go into the market, start scanning for deals, there’s two places that you can look. You can go on market, you go to brokers, you know, biz, buy, sell, Transworld, Benchmark, all these guys. Or what we tend to do a lot more of in Protege is is off market deal flow. Right? So we have all these amazing strategies to start building relationship networks. You mentioned your first deal came to a referral. We do a lot of a direct approach here where we write directly to, business owners.

But then one of the other strategies that we deploy, and I think you’ve really mastered this inside of Protege, and you you know, you teach on this, and then I think you have a service around this as well, is the whole concept of leveraging LinkedIn. Right? What I’ve never been able to fathom with LinkedIn is it’s like, I think if you work in business, it’s probably the most powerful tool out there. And for the most part, it’s free. Right? You can buy the premium service for LinkedIn navigator, I think it’s called, and find out all these really cool things. But just as a tool, a free tool for for most of the population, it’s such an incredible thing that that you can leverage.

I always say to people, build up your LinkedIn network. Post on LinkedIn. Talk about the deals that you’re doing. Like, people will follow you. Right? And you can find people on LinkedIn that potentially you can get money from them, you can buy their business, you can find deal partners, you can do all these different things. But talk to me about your system because you developed this really, really cool system by the Yoda system for deal flow. And a lot of the other proteges are, like, they’re raving about it. Right? Let’s just talk about that for a minute.

So, you know, backtrack to, you know, when I talked about getting frustrated with the brokers, And I tell proteges this all the time. Play to your strengths. Well, my strength was LinkedIn. Right? I’m a recruiter and, you know, LinkedIn reached out to recruiters to utilize their platform when it was still in beta. So I’ve been on the thing since, like, two thousand and three or whatever. And, you know, most people just kinda fill out their profile like it’s their resume, and LinkedIn encouraged that. It’s changing now, but there’s over a billion profiles on LinkedIn. It’s they’re really and it’s not even close. It’s the number one B2B platform.

And so I leveraged LinkedIn to source my deals. And as I started to scale and started to provide services for others, right, I was taking these deals to private equity funds and and investors and stuff. And they’re like, where are you getting all these from? How do you do this? Can you do it for us? And then proteges are like, I don’t I don’t want you to teach me. I want you to do it. So, yeah, we we have that service.

But what I found is not every vertical is as well represented on LinkedIn as recruitment firms, right, obviously. But it’s still the best platform for sourcing targets. But LinkedIn limits you to the outreach. So we had to become masters of the cold email. And then we had to, you know, find an alternative way. So now we’ve got a system where, we source them, and we target them on LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, Twitter DMs, as well as cold email and SMS. And then with the new regulatory environment, SMS become problematic to scale. Right?

So I found a way to connect an eSIM card to our CRM. Wow. We can send unlimited text, and it’s mobile to mobile. It’s our because we you know, I send twenty five, thirty thousand SMS messages every month. And those we get, you know, like, a twenty six percent reply rate on. It’s just astronomical compared to the, to the other stuff other than LinkedIn. But LinkedIn limits you to a couple hundred a week. Right? So it’s you can’t scale that. So, yeah, it’s been a lot of trial and error, a lot of late nights and grueling hours, and I’ve had to become way more technical than I care to. But, yeah, that’s kinda how we did it.

And then, you know, that’s what led me into the last two acquisitions. One was a marketing agency that exclusively did marketing for recruitment agencies and staffing firms. And then the last one, is a a a database. So it was a co-op of recruiters that shared their databases. It was on a SQL platform so that we could search it for sourcing candidates and client marketing and whatnot.

That’s so cool.

And remind me, what’s the name of the program?

We call it Deal Yoda done for you service, but it’s the Deal Yoda marketing.

Wearing my Star Wars t shirt, especially for this podcast interview. Right? So I was Really? Showering this morning. I was looking. I thought, Ryan, I’m talking to Jim Helms today, and and we’ve got a Yoda program for LinkedIn. So I’m gonna wear my Star Wars, T shirt in honor of, like, not only you building that and doing some incredible deals for yourself, but then your ability to coach that to the rest of our community and really help them get deals as well off that, which is amazing.

So, Jim, we love you, man. I hope you spend some time with Chris while he’s up there.

Yeah. I’ve got it. It’s all month’s almost over. I need to get together with him and take him out fishing.

Yeah. I know. But, hey. I really appreciate your time today. Keep doing everything that you’re doing, doing your deals, making money, helping me coach this incredible tribe of people. It is an awesome day.

No. I really appreciate you, Jim. Thanks for everything that you do.

Thanks, Carl. Really appreciate you being on the show.

Thank you for having me.

Take care, guys.